Finding bullets for a modern gun in a fantasy city

[Michael Cule]

I've got a character who is a modern British police officer (Special Branch if it matters) who is transported to a fantasy city with early modern (say early eighteenth century) tech.

Black powder is known but forbidden in the city: fire elementals just love the stuff. Sources of power are limited so most machinery has to be water, wind or animal powered.

She wants to find replacement ammo for her gun. She has a few bullets she can show as samples.

What are the practical difficulties in finding something? I can come up with plenty of magical handwaves but I would like to have a realistic sense of what I am hand-waving around.

[RogerBW]

Save your brass! That's the thing you absolutely can't replace. You can cast bullets, and with sufficient ingenuity ram them and the powder into the case. (Look up "hand-loading" for some of the fun people have doing this.)

Using black powder in a gun designed for modern propellants will cause horrible fouling. But duplicating the modern stuff will take magic.

If this is GURPS: the box on High-Tech p.163 shows how easy it is to load a black powder weapon, but each thing that works better in a modern gun makes it harder. High-Tech p.174 has the procedure for hand-loading once you've got the bits. But I think propellant is going to be the really hard problem.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

I've got a character who is a modern British police officer (Special Branch if it matters) who is transported to a fantasy city with early modern (say early eighteenth century) tech.

What are the practical difficulties in finding something? I can come up with plenty of magical handwaves but I would like to have a realistic sense of what I am hand-waving around.

What sort of gun is important. If we're talking about a 9mm black powder could be problematic. 9mm is normally loaded to pressures that black powder can't achieve.

Not only would this mean a substantial loss of power but probably not enough recoll to operate the autoloading mechanism. A .45 ACP is loaded to much lower pressures and might work.

The next issue is primers and it's a pretty severe one. The early 1800s is about the time this Vicar in Scotland invented the percussion cap but there's still 60 years or more between that and a modern-ish primer.

It wouldn't be impossible but it would be involved and fussy. Besides the messing about with mercuric fulminate and the possibility of ending up mad as a hatter from the fumes physically constructing a primer involves machining to very tight specs. You'd pretty much have to design and build am machine to do it for you. so you'd not only need complete familiarity with the process but Mechanical Engineering Skill too.

Brass cartridges that won't split when fired and jam the gun is also non-trivial. When I looked up brass making once I got a video with 14 steps including 3 passes through an annealing oven. This is also after you get materials with adequate purity.

Making the bullets is the simplest step but might still need some trial and error about getting a good enough lead alloy. Or possibly inventing the copper jacket.

Making smokeless powder is another one of those things that is by no means impossible but needs some particular skills. n particular synthesis of highly pure sulfuric and nitric acids. You'd also re-invent nitrocellulose or NC and Nitroglycerin before you got the smokeless powder.

A police officer who had all the skills to do this would be unusual. I'd give it up as a bad job. Re-inventing the Colt percussion revolver might be a good bit more practical. Especially if you use magic to replace the primers.

[Michael Cule]

Black powder is specifically not available. It's known but forbidden in the city.

The brass is hard to duplicate. I got that. Why? Assuming a magical equivalent of the propellant chemicals in the bullet can be managed are there other problems?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Michael Cule

The brass is hard to duplicate. I got that. Why?

Its mechanical properties, in strength, flexibility and springiness are crucial. The brass cartridge case is an important moving part in the operation of the gun. Failures are most likely to be jams, but you can damage the gun or blow it up with a sufficiently defective case.

All this means that the precise proportions of the different metals in the alloy called brass are important. The manufacturing process, including the heat-treatment is also important: that heat treatment isn't uniform, but needs to produce different combinations of strength, flexibility and springiness in different parts of a small brass cylinder: 19mm long and about 9mm diameter.

Modern ammunition originated in the late nineteenth century, when developments in chemistry, metallurgy and mass production came together. It was seriously high-tech stuff at the time, and couldn't have been done earlier.

Fortunately, used brass cartridge cases can be re-used, a few times, with care and some skill.

Assuming a magical equivalent of the propellant chemicals in the bullet can be managed are there other problems?

The main problem is the primer. This is a small metal capsule at the back of the cartridge case which contains shock-sensitive explosive chemicals. The propellant chemicals in the case aren't shock-sensitive. The primer explodes and ignites the propellant when it's hit by the firing pin. That's driven by a spring (tensioning that is part of "cocking" the gun) and released by pulling the trigger.

So that's an extra kind of chemical that you need a magical substitute for. Making the capsule by hand is both fiddly, since it's so small - under 2mm across - and has quite a complicated shape, and dangerous, since the stuff you're putting in it will explode if handled harshly.

Modern people who reload used cartridge cases always buy new primers AFAIK. They're made by machines that run unattended, for safety, and have been since at least the 1920s, probably earlier.

[mehrkat]

I can't imagine the precision and supplies you need being possible without supplies. The inferior products would likely destroy the weapon (possibly your hand) or just not work. Or sometimes destroy you and sometimes just not work.

The only feasible option that I can see would be create spells. Almost every gaming system that I've come across has spells for creating things. Just require that they have one original for the wizard to be able to copy it. Make the spell/skill level in spell rare to taste seems the only way to go.

That seems like the only really viable option without some sort of magical assistance to the crafting or someone having accidentally brought over a modern gun manufacturers tools.

[Murrkon5]

Starting to sound like that Chris Rock routine on gun control. "Don't ban guns. Just make bullets $5,000 apiece! 'I'm gonna get me a second job and I'm gonna save up and someday I'm gonna come back and put a cap in your ass!'"

Sounds to me like the most streamlined handwaving isn't recreating an industrial technology with half-science/half-magic but that your copper find a wizard who has some variation of "Snatcher". With a sample to focus on, said wizard could pull a couple of boxes of bona fide cartridges thru the dimensional walls.

[Michael Cule]

Hmmm, the snatcher suggestion is a good one. It solves so many problems and allows for a complication later on when her friend with the extraordinary reach gets into trouble.

It makes her ammo expensive but available. The slight twinge in her conscience about stealing the stuff will have to be repressed.

I get a set of scenes in which she goes to the alchemists, the engineers and the magicians.... and then discovers a 'little man' who can fix things.

OK. Thank you all. I know how that works out now!

[tshiggins]

On a semi-related note, this discussion is why most modern "survival" computer games are pretty bogus. It's not that the guns are hard to find, it's that modern firearms (especially military automatic weapons) chew through ammunition so quickly.

To maintain ammunition supplies, an assembly line is needed, as well as entire supply-chain for basic resources. You need the copper and zinc and mercury and phosphates. You need the foundry to make the brass ingots, and then an entire line to pull the brass cartridges and then heat them properly.

Then, you need the chemical plant create the fulminate (without blowing itself off the map) and then put it in the percussion caps, which some machine then needs to fasten and seal into the base of the cartridges.

After that, the brass cartridges need to be loaded with propellant and shot by the tens of thousands, because a real firefight can chew through several hundred rounds per rifle, pretty easily.

Most police officers have no idea how to do any of that. They have (better or worse) people skills, some tactical knowledge, and can do a good job with routine equipment they normally carry on their persons. They'll also have clear preferences for such minutiae as trigger-pull weights and grain-loads, as well as such things as pistol grip preferences.

They'll also know all the gun-shops and firing ranges, in town, and which ones provide the best quality service, and when they need more ammo or significant changes to their equipment, they'll take it to those people. Most can't and don't do that work, themselves.

If the officer has a fascination with historical firearms, he might be able to work with a local blacksmith and a jeweler to produce a flintlock rifled musket or pistol. Those don't require brass cartridges -- or even percussion caps.

Basically, the officer needs to invent soap or cheap paper, make a small fortune, and then hire thugs with experience in local head-knocking techiques to handle the dirty-work. He's not going to find anyway to create ammunition for a modern firearm, any time soon.

Heck, he can't even make it to 18th Century technology, unless he knows what he's doing and gets lucky enough to find several patient smiths -- and has a way to pay them.

[Disliker of the mary sue]

So more or less unless this guy had a extensive knowledge of the process of creating ammunition, the machines you need to do that, and how to make said machines it is next to impossible. if you know all that and can make it work with old timey materials your probably better off becoming a weapon's dealer then an adventurer.